


After

by glamaphonic



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon Character of Color, F/F, Female Character of Color, Female Friendship, POV Female Character, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-15
Updated: 2010-05-15
Packaged: 2017-10-09 11:02:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/86566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glamaphonic/pseuds/glamaphonic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are wounds on every side.</p>
            </blockquote>





	After

**Author's Note:**

  * For [grimorie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/grimorie/gifts).



> For the alphabet fic meme. Letter A for after.

The Kyoshi Warriors do not come often to the isles of the Fire Nation. They have no business to bring them there and though they—and all peaceful visitors—are welcomed by Fire Lord Zuko, troops of foreign warriors are not so welcomed by the people. They have been invaders for a hundred years, but they have also been invaded themselves in recent memory. There are wounds on every side.

So, sometimes, rarely, Ty Lee comes, bright and green, with her new sisters. But mostly, she comes alone. She does not announce herself or write beforehand. She considers it a game with Mai, leaving her friend to try to track her movements, to figure out when she's going to pop up on the doorstep of the palace—more commonly through a window into some inner chamber—face scrubbed clean, body wreathed in pink and red.

It never takes long for Mai to find her once she's there. Usually it's one of Mai's rooms in which she has appeared. When Mai does find her, she offers her a formal announcement that Ty Lee always declines. An official visit would require seeing her family, and her parents would just want her to come home.

She goes to see Azula instead.

Mai sees her off, but doesn't go with her. Both Mai and Zuko make their own visits to Azula, alone and on their own terms. Ty Lee sneaks in through the back. The compound isn't so much a compound as a house—a manor. Stately and demure and mostly empty. Azula is not its only occupant but she is one of few.

Ty Lee knows the path to her room and she slips in when the attendants are otherwise occupied.

Azula turns her face away, chin up, proud—the dragon princess, the Fire Lord—golden eyes gleaming.

Ty Lee keeps her distance, folds herself up into a ball and watches Azula. Sometimes, Azula never speaks, never looks at her, never acknowledges her presence outside of that first act of dismissal. So, Ty Lee sits quietly, studying her, cataloging all the ways in which she has and has not changed—colors sliding, blurring in her madness, bleeding into one another—until it is time for the attendants to return and for her to go.

But sometimes, Azula relents.

"Ty Lee," she says, voice cracking like a whip still. "Why do you come here?"

"Because I love you," Ty Lee replies every time. She always has. Azula used to know that—she used to accept it as her due the same way she did the slide of Ty Lee's hands and mouth. Smooth, pretty young skin pressed together, her whole world condensed down to Azula's red, red lips and fingernails. Everything else was gray, lifeless.

"You're a liar," Azula snarls, sneers, presses her pink tongue against her white teeth.

When Ty Lee reaches for her hand, Azula doesn't send her away.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] After](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10030919) by [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly)




End file.
